Paris Comes Uptown, Sézane Opens L'Appartement on Madison Avenue

The new Sézane on Madison Avenue locks its doors at seven. By then the dress has already left the building.

The French label opened its newest New York shop on Friday, October 2, at 1045 Madison Avenue. Sézane's own announcement places it at Madison Avenue and 79th Street and calls the move its arrival uptown. It is the brand's third permanent shop in the city, after Nolita and Williamsburg, and it covers 2,800 square feet, according to WWD.

The brand calls its shops Appartements, and this one goes by L'Appartement on Madison Avenue. The idea is a Paris home with the sensibility of a gallery. It is a domestic word for a commercial room, and on this stretch of the Upper East Side, where the shops sit under apartment windows, it fits.

The Room

The designer is Pierre Lacroix, an interior design studio based in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. WWD says this is the studio's first retail project in the United States.

Lacroix told WWD that the studio always tries to begin with "the existing space, its architecture and its history," and to build on it rather than wipe it clean. The result, per the same report, is warm oak parquet, mirrored surfaces and sculptural lighting, in a palette of chestnut, amber and ecru.

"The existing space, its architecture and its history."

Vintage furniture fills the rooms, along with books. The walls carry work by William Klein, the Franco-American photographer whose pictures of New York streets and Paris fashion helped define both in the second half of the last century. Hanging Klein on Madison Avenue is a quiet nod in two directions at once.

The palette does the rest. Chestnut and amber are evening colors. Under warm light, on a parquet floor, they read like a living room just before guests arrive.

What Goes Out the Door

Morgane Sézalory founded Sézane in Paris in 2013, and the company is a certified B Corp, WWD reports. The Madison Avenue shop carries women's ready-to-wear and accessories, plus Petit Sézane, the children's line, in sizes from newborn to 12 years.

Sézane built its name online first. Its shops, from the original Paris Appartement to the one on Elizabeth Street in Nolita, have always been staged as places to linger rather than to grab and go. The Madison Avenue room follows the same script, scaled up for the avenue.

The brand marked the opening with a giveaway. On opening day, three pairs of customers were to be picked at random, and each pair would share a $1,000 Sézane voucher, according to the promotion page. The pitch was to invite the person you would most like to discover the new Appartement with. Shopping, in other words, as a date.

The timing is part of a busy autumn for the house. WWD notes that the New York opening follows the early fall debut of 117 Rue du Bac, the brand's largest Paris address to date. One new apartment on the Left Bank, one on the Upper East Side, a few weeks apart.

Uptown After Six

Madison Avenue in the upper seventies is not a nightlife strip. It is gallery openings, hotel bars and dinner reservations, and the shops along it set the dress code for all three. The new Sézane joins that run of windows at a moment when the city is trading linen for knitwear and the evenings are getting longer and darker.

Downtown has been busy too. Hermès recently opened a permanent store in Williamsburg, which we covered in Orange Boxes on Berry Street, and the Met has given fashion a new home, as we wrote in The Dressed Body. Uptown now has a Paris apartment of its own.

What to Know Before You Go

The shop is at 1045 Madison Avenue, at 79th Street. Sézane lists the hours as Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The 6 train stops at 77th Street and Lexington Avenue, two blocks east.

Go late in the day. Buy the coat at six. Wear it to dinner at eight.